March/April 2009
To sort, or not to sort, is the question electronics recyclers are asking about electronics plastics. Recovery and reuse markets exist for mixed material, but for some, turning e-plastics back into e-plastics is the ultimate goal.
By Theodore Fischer
From the smallest cell phone to the largest television, most electronic devices have one thing in common: They're housed in plastic. If you were to crack them open, you'd find even more plastic inside, functioning as wire insulation, fasteners, circuitboards, keys, switches, and so on. Plastic is a relatively small proportion of end-of-life electronics by weight—only 17 percent, according to a Swiss study conducted in 2002. But taking into account the 2.5 million tons of U.S. electronics discarded in 2007, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, that's still 425,000 tons of electronics plastics discarded that year alone.
The EPA predicts the volume of end-of-life electronics will grow 8 percent a year, with an extra spike this year due to the digital television transition. Whether the plastic in these products is a problem, a challenge, or an opportunity depends largely on your point of view. Environmentalists worry about the health hazards of brominated flame retardants, substances added to some electronics plastics to slow their ignition or combustion. Some recyclers wonder whether to invest in separation technology to capture more value from individual plastic streams or to rely on the domestic and international markets for the mixed plastics product. Those who separate the material into individual polymer types—which manufacturers can once again turn into electronics components—tout the importance of truly closing the loop of a product's lifecycle.
Debunking Myths
The American Plastics Council (Arlington, Va.) makes the case for recovering plastics from electronic scrap in "An Industry Full of Potential," a 2003 report that debunks 10 commonly held myths about the process. Contrary to popular belief, the report states, there are not "too many" different types of plastics in electronics to feasibly separate them. A European study of electronic scrap collected from industrial, residential, and commercial sources found a dozen different types of plastic, while a Minnesota study of residential electronics recycling found only eight types. Notably, the Minnesota study found that one plastic—high-impact polystyrene—constituted more than half of the plastics in the electronics collected, most likely because it's the dominant plastic in television sets, which were the most prevalent item collected in the study.
Nor is it impossible to identify and separate electronics plastics, the APC points out. The council has done its own research with plastics recycler MBA Polymers (Richmond, Calif.) to prove the feasibility of identifying and separating electronics plastics into individual polymer streams, and other companies have developed their own technologies. Though markets for recycled electronics plastics are neither plentiful nor widespread, they are evolving, the report states. The aforementioned Minnesota study found revenue-generating markets for both mixed and separated plastics. "Plastics from end-of-life electronic products can be—and are being—collected, sorted, and reprocessed into new and useful consumer goods," the report concludes.
Recovery Versus Recycling
Material recovery—processing the plastics for reuse—is generally considered the best, highest use of electronics plastics. That said, it's likely that only a small proportion of electronics plastics in the United States currently takes that path. At worst, "it's not being recycled at all," says Robin Ingenthron, president of recycling management firm American Retroworks (Middlebury, Vt.) and of the World Reuse, Repair and Recycling Association (WR3A). Landfilling electronics—or electronics plastics—is legal in most states.
Even companies with a "no landfill" policy don't necessarily recycle the plastics for reuse. When electronics are shredded, the plastics can end up in a mixed stream that contains precious metals and other nonferrous metals. Metals consumers purchase this product and smelt it, burning off the plastics to collect the gold, silver, copper, and aluminum. The plastics, derived from petroleum, help fuel the smelting process.
Electronics plastics also can serve as an alternative fuel in cement kilns and waste-to-energy facilities. The Encyclopedia of Earth Web site notes that 1 ton of plastic in a cement kiln can replace nearly 1.3 tons of coal and provide beneficial properties in the combustion process. Burning scrap plastics in a cement kiln as a replacement for coal reduces greenhouse gas emissions more than burning them in a waste-to-energy facility or even some processes of recycling them back into plastics, according to research by the Fraunhofer Institute (Munich, Germany) cited by Cembureau, the European Cement Association (Brussels).
Energy recovery also is one way to dispose of electronics plastics containing brominated flame retardants. These substances have the potential to damage the liver, thyroid, and neurological system in humans and other creatures, according to the EPA, and there's growing interest in preventing their release into the environment. Environmentalists worry that burning BFR-containing plastics does exactly that, but EPA and European Union reports conclude that burning the material at the high temperatures possible in a smelter or waste-to-energy facility (above 1,600 degrees F), in combination with emissions control technologies, significantly reduces the risk.
The EPA recommends energy recovery as the best use for electronics plastics that cannot be recycled. But electronics recyclers who sign on to the agency's new, voluntary Responsible Recycling (R2) Practices—and participants in ReMA's RIOS program—must plan to follow a hierarchy for processing the material that begins with reuse and material recovery. To take that path, recyclers have the choice of marketing for reuse a mixed plastics fragment or separating the plastics to sell as individual polymer streams.
Markets for mixed electronics plastics include companies who use it in road surfaces and to make products such as outdoor furniture, highway sound barriers, and railroad ties. Composite plastic railroad ties have several benefits over wood or concrete—they are impervious to rot, fungus, and insect damage that can shorten the lifespan of wood ties, and they're lighter and easier to install than concrete. But "compared to the number of railroad ties needed out there, there's not very much of this plastic" being made available for tie production, Ingenthron says. "Just because you can find a place to send it to doesn't mean you have enough to be scalable. There's just not enough plastic to compete with wood." Electronics recyclers also have the option of selling mixed plastics to plastics processors, who granulate it, remove nonplastic materials, and use a variety of mechanical techniques to separate the different polymer types and grades.
Separation Anxiety
As with any recyclable product, the more uniform the material, the greater its value. There's no guarantee, however, that the value will be high enough for a company to recoup its investment in separation equipment. Some electronics plastics separation can be done without any additional investment by segregating equipment by type and dismantling the casings. "We separate down to HIPS and ABS [acrylonitrile butadiene styrene] plastics," says Trip Alford, president of American Electronics Recycling (Sarasota, Fla.). The ABS typically comes from computers and monitors, he explains, whereas the HIPS comes from televisions. As a rule, Alford says, most of the ABS is white and most of the HIPS is black.
Beyond HIPS and ABS, electronics contain considerable amounts of polycarbonate and PC/ABS blends along with trace amounts of acetal polyoxymethylene—mostly on components like computer gears—and some polyethylene terephthalate, says Rafael Reveles, engineering and technical director, North America, for Sims Recycling Solutions (West Chicago, Ill.). What technologies do Sims and other recyclers use to separate these plastics? They'd rather not say. "The technology behind this is still evolving, and people don't want to divulge what they're doing because they have made a significant investment in it," Reveles explains. "It's not common knowledge, like eddy currents or electromagnetic drums."
Reveles will say that automated sorting machines can employ a variety of electronic sensors to detect unique properties of plastic particles as they pass along a conveyor belt and then use air jets to deflect them off the belt and into different chutes. SINTEF (Oslo, Norway) produces a sorter based on infrared spectroscopy; it uses ordinary halogen lamps as a light source to distinguish among different kinds of plastics according to minute variations in the color of the reflected infrared light. IMS Electronics Recycling (Poway, Calif.) uses optical sorting equipment developed by its sister company, MSS (Nashville, Tenn.). "It gives us the ability to remove metals from plastic streams, and it also helps us identify different types of plastic," says Ed Siegel, IMS' general manager. "It lets us optically sort out several different streams of plastic" from electronic scrap, he says.
Another sorting method involves liquid density techniques. Flottweg (Vilsbiburg, Germany) manufactures the Sorticanter centrifuge, in which solids with a lower density than the liquid separation medium float, while those with higher densities settle to the bottom. Researchers at the University of Rome have developed a seemingly similar technology, reports the European Commission's Directorate General on the Environment. The Multidune separator—so named because its shape resembles sand dunes—sends a mixture of plastic particles and fluid through a series of pipes to separate the various plastics according to their densities.
SDR Technologies (Millwood, W.Va.), a 20-year-old plastics recycling and compounding firm, has pioneered its own technologies for sorting mixed polymers from electronics for reuse in higher-end products. Like other processors of electronics plastics, SDR won't reveal its methods. "What I can say is that it's not just one process," says Doug Ritchie, SDR's president. "We use multiple technologies to separate and clean the materials and basically get them back to good properties. We are recovering mixed-stream plastics to the purity level, and we are able to put a percentage into a compounded product."
SDR got involved in recycling electronics plastics through the Mid-Atlantic Recycling Center for End-of-Life Electronics (MARCEE) Project, a collaboration among the Polymer Alliance Zone (Davisville, W.Va.), West Virginia University (Morgantown, W.Va.), and consulting firm Innovative Management & Technology Services (Fairmont, W.Va.), which works to tap the knowledge and resources of West Virginia's plastics industry to create a regional model for recovering electronics plastics. "Our focus was on what you could do to create value in these plastics," Ritchie says. "We purchased equipment and had it up and running this year, getting the bugs worked out to receive the separation we needed. It's not just lab-scale, it's a production plant." The group expected the operation to be processing 10 million tons on an annual basis by the end of 2008.
Regardless of which technology or combination of technologies recyclers choose, they will confront substantial technical and financial problems, Reveles says. "One of the big challenges is that the chemistry for these different plastics changes by manufacturer [and] by the date when they were made," he says. "You might shred electronics made in 2000 and some made in 2007, and the HIPS plastic is not going to be exactly the same." To compensate for those differences, the buyers sometimes blend the recycled material with virgin resin to achieve the quality they require, he says.
Another major challenge is financial. "You need to spend a lot of money for this equipment, and if the market prices aren't that good for your products, the [return on investment] is going to take a lot longer," Reveles says. "Things were going OK with plastics but—as everybody knows—all commodities have declined, so now that's a challenge." Reveles is optimistic about the future of separation for reuse, however. "Although commodity prices are low at present, we are confident that our investment in new separation technology, combined with our ongoing research into end uses for the materials, will pay off in the long term," he says. "As a result of our activities during the downturn, we expect to be in a position to provide even more sustainable and economically viable recycling solutions for our clients when the market recovers."
Who's Purchasing Polymers?
Before investing in separation equipment, recyclers naturally want to know whether there are markets for the various polymers they find in electronics plastics. In 2001, The Gordon Institute, part of the School of Engineering at Tufts University (Medford, Mass.), completed an EPA-funded project on recovering engineering thermoplastics—the name for the types of plastics used in electronics. The report listed more than 30 products in a variety of industries that potentially could be produced from these plastics, including new electronics (modems, fax machines, phones), auto parts (bumpers, mirror housings), electrical components (fuse boxes, connectors, wire coating), construction materials (flooring, countertops, insulation), and household appliances (vacuum cleaners, TVs, coffee machines). Multiple vendors sell imprintable desk accessories and novelty items such as bookmarks, license plate frames, and mugs made from recycled electronics plastics. And television casings, wire spools, and fan bases were among the items made from electronics plastics processed at MBA Polymers' plant in China, according to a July/August 2006 Scrap profile of the company.
Driving some of the demand for reprocessed plastics is the Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool, a program of the Green Electronics Council (Portland, Ore.). EPEAT evaluates computers and monitors based on a set of 53 environmental-impact criteria and awards worthy products a gold, silver, or bronze rating, which governments and other institutional buyers use to determine the "green-ness" of potential electronics purchases.
To receive an EPEAT designation at any level, the plastic parts in any newly manufactured electronic product must average 5 percent postconsumer recycled content. Reaching 10 percent or 25 percent postconsumer recycled plastic content qualifies the product for one or two additional points, respectively, toward a higher rating. "Everyone wants to buy a Gold EPEAT-rated piece of equipment, and that's creating a demand for recycled content," Ritchie says. "We become part of a closed loop in the electronics industry for getting these materials back into electronics again."
The Export Question
Electronics processors have one other option for their plastics: They can export them to regions where low labor costs make it cost-effective to hand-sort plastics for recycling. "I've heard there are cities in China where you can take any plastic ever made by man into a marketplace and, if you show it to enough people, someone will get you connected with someone who knows exactly what it is," Ingenthron says. "That's the miracle of China: With poor natural resources, high manufacturing [skills], and cheap labor, they're able to hand sort it to a spec where it will get to the right place and best use. Then it becomes a question of whether you have enough of it to be worth transacting any business."
Exporting electronics plastic scrap has both virtues and drawbacks, Ingenthron says. "The positive side of exporting is that the resin itself is likely to wind up at its highest and best end use and therefore its highest value," he says. "The bad news is that it's very difficult to establish a chain of custody. If I'm collecting a bunch of laser printers from [Bank X], and the plastic is broken off and sent to China, what protects [that company] from Greenpeace or Basel Action Network showing up and taking a picture of a 6-year-old kid playing with a piece of smoldering junk labeled ‘Property of [Bank X]'?"
James Schrack, director of product sustainability for the Product Stewardship Institute (Boston), explains that "in countries where there isn't much regulation, [processors will] burn the wires and cables to get rid of all the plastic coating" and recycle the metal. "But the responsible companies do a good job of taking things apart—so their employees aren't injured in the process—and making sure any of the end markets they send their products to [process] it correctly." In other words, when scrap electronics plastics get exported to developing countries, the exporters must be diligent about ensuring the material is actually getting recycled, not landfilled or burned in environmentally detrimental ways.
Securing Sufficient Supply
Some industry participants wonder whether the competition from abroad is hindering the growth of a domestic market for processed electronics plastics. "We've been trying to compete in a marketplace that's completely unfair by demanufacturing materials domestically at a much higher cost than our competitors abroad," says IMS' Siegel. "Because a lot of material is going to a lot of unknown destinations, there hasn't been enough volume of material for an industry to develop underneath it." Further, the supply available in the United States does not yet compare with that available in other developed countries. MBA Polymers, which has a high-tech plant in China to process Japanese e-plastics and one in Austria for European e-plastics, has no plans to build a full-scale facility in North America due to the low collection and concentration levels of scrap electronics here, the company reported in 2006.
It's something of a chicken-or-egg proposition: If the United States recycled more electronic scrap, and more e-scrap plastics were processed for reuse, would markets emerge for the material? Or does demand for recycled plastics need to emerge first, which would create the incentive for collection and processing? "The American Plastics Council always says there's going to be an optical sorter, there's going to be flotation, there's some high-tech Japanese process on the horizon" for separating and processing electronics plastics, Ingenthron says. "It usually boils down to being technologically possible to do something, but you would need a million tons to commercialize it—and nobody's ever going to have a million tons of the stuff."
Others are more optimistic. "We sell a lot in North America and expect more people to have an interest in postconsumer contents," SDR's Ritchie says. "This industry is going to grow immensely because [the world has] a finite amount of resources. The infrastructures are coming into place, the technology is out there, and we have the capability of doing it." •
Theodore Fischer is a writer based in Silver Spring, Md.
To sort, or not to sort, is the question electronics recyclers are asking about electronics plastics. Recovery and reuse markets exist for mixed material, but for some, turning e-plastics back into e-plastics is the ultimate goal.